Jazz Events Live – Entering a New Era (JEL 4)

Dear jazz fans and musicians,

When we launched Jazz Events Live in October 2021, we had no idea how quickly it would grow. In just a few months, we’ll be entering our fifth year – and what a journey it has been!

Our story actually begins in 2013, when Irini Konstantinidi started a small Facebook group dedicated to jazz along with Manthos Giourzoglou. Over the years, the team expanded to include George Govesis, and myself, Paul Koch. Together, we’ve built Jazz Events Live into a platform that not only serves Greece’s jazz scene but also pushes the limits of how music can be promoted in a fast-changing digital world.

The Current State – Jazz Events Live 3
The current version of our platform, JEL 3, focuses exclusively on the Greek jazz scene. Even with this local focus, we’ve reached:

• 100+ unique visitors per day – over 15,000 unique visitors per year
• More than 50,000 Google impressions in July alone
• Nearly 2,000 clicks in July alone – and that’s not even peak season
• A database of 1,000+ artists, 800 venues, and 50 festivals – all in Greece

These numbers show something important: More people than ever are discovering jazz in Greece through Jazz Events Live.

Challenges and Lessons Learned
In recent years, we’ve learned a lot about the music industry. We’ve explored creative ideas, applied for subsidies, and taken part in European projects. One highlight was winning the HEMI Music Hub incubator in 2024. Yet, even with that success, the current landscape of cultural subsidies in Europe has proven more disappointing than ever. Today, most funding bodies treat the entire “creative sector” as a single category, making little to no distinction between serious music performed by highly trained musicians, music of real cultural significance, and mass-market commercial entertainment. As a result, projects that aim to preserve, promote, and innovate in culturally important music like jazz are often measured against the same criteria as purely commercial ventures — a reality that makes securing meaningful support increasingly difficult.

Does this mean we’re stopping? Absolutely not. It just means that our big dream project will take longer than expected. It’s still in the works – and while details aren’t public yet, I promise one day it will see the light of day.

The Next Step – JEL 4
The future is exciting. With Jazz Events Live 4, we’re harnessing the power of advanced AI tools. While AI can be a threat to creativity, we’re using it to make things easier for musicians, venues, and fans:

• Add an event in under 30 seconds
• Automatic translation for global reach
• AI-generated descriptions and artist filtering
• Seamless social media publishing directly from our platform (instead of the other way around)

And here’s the big news – we’re going global! Events will be searchable by geography, and with instant translation, there will be no borders for jazz.

Making It Sustainable
For the past 2 years, I’ve been personally investing (or maybe losing?) around €200 per month in pure financial costs to keep Greek jazz events visible. That doesn’t even include the countless hours of work to keep the system running — or the dedication of our loyal team of content administrators, without whom this platform would not exist.

Going global will certainly be more costly, but we believe it will also open new opportunities and solutions. To make this sustainable, JEL 4 will introduce a slightly adjusted financial model so we can finally turn this into a profitable, long-term business that supports the jazz community worldwide.

Coming Before Year’s End
We expect JEL 4 to be live before the end of this year. When it launches, our goal is clear: to become the biggest and best jazz events source in the world.

Stay tuned – the next chapter in Jazz Events Live is about to begin.

Paul Koch

Co-Founder & Developer
Jazz Events Live